From Trash To Treasure: Raumlabor’s Recycled Home

My mother always told me that recycling was a good thing to do for the environment (thanks, Mom!). Plenty of architects are catching onto the trend: we’ve written previously about a façade made from a thousand doors, recycled bus shelters in Uganda’s bustling capital city, and, of course, shipping container urbanism. There certainly isn’t a shortage of useable material on this planet that begs to be re-made into something new.

One new installation that puts recycling at the fore is Officina Roma, a project that is part of the recently-completed RE-cycle exhibition at Rome’s Museo nazionale della arti des XXI secolo (MAXXI). Raumlabor’s new project is completely recycled: the objects have new life breathed into them, be they bottles (now making up the kitchen walls), car doors (now making up the bedroom walls), or oil barrels (now the ceiling).

Officina Roma was built with the help of 24 Italian high school students during a workshop, and is a playful reconceptualisation of what we can do to recycle found objects in architecture beyond just the usual used shipping containers.

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